Society 101: Measuring Our Society
Now we have a better idea of the point of having societies, and what good ones can look like. So how does our society measure up? I’m focusing on my own here, which is the United States.
What are our priorities?
We prioritize the rights and comfort of the privileged majority over the safety and hopes of the marginalized.
Who benefits? Who is excluded?
Our society was built to benefit straight white Protestant men. We’ve made some progress in extending basic rights to other groups. We have yet to substantively correct the resource and opportunity and justice imbalances created since the beginning of the country
How informed and engaged are our fellow citizens?
Our fellow citizens are incredibly uneducated in general, and largely ignorant of the basics of how the current system works. Voter turnout is incredibly low. There is little evidence to suggest that the majority of voters vote by policy or integrity of the candidates.
Engagement at the local level in many areas is non-existent. That is until things are so bad that it can’t be ignored, by which point it’s often too late to effect change. That then, combined with general ignorance, leads people to think engaging in politics is pointless and the system is rigged beyond repair.
What is typically required for change?
There is a saying that “regulations are written in blood” because of the history behind nearly every environmental or safety regulation we have. But this idea applies to nearly all of the progress we’ve seen in our country. We demand harmed groups beg and plead for each and every crumb of freedom, opportunity, or protection from their fellow citizens.
We get rules preventing dumping chemicals in rivers only after the graves of children who died of cancer as a result grew to be too many to deny.
We got minimal accommodations for disabled folks only after activists literally crawled up the steps of the US Capitol to show the world the problems of inaccessible buildings.
We got research to treat AIDS after begging for over a decade for a shred of action from our fellow citizens. To illustrate the urgency to the federal government, we had to create the largest art installation in the world, a quilt memoralizing a few of the folks we lost in the epidemic.
We got gay marriage by pleading for the right to see our loved one in the hospital on their death beds.
We got equal voting rights because of the bloodied bodies on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and so, so many other places.
We got minimal workers rights on the backs of coal miners who sacrificed everything to form unions and break the power of their employers.
We got desegregation only after the terrorization of innocent people was made too public to be ignored.
None of these rights were all that were needed. But it’s all that was deemed worthy to mete out. And every single one has been under attack to be reversed from the moment it was extended.
Instead of starting with the most expansive view of freedom we can, we make every marginalized group bleed sufficiently to prove their cause is just enough to warrant a single begrudging step forward.
This reality reminds us that our fight for progress is two-fold. We fight for a substantive change in culture and education for the long-term, and fight for small steps of harm mitigation in the short-term.
The progress we have isn’t permanent, nor is it sufficient. We live in a world that many generations before us barely dared to dream would be possible. It is also a world in which unneeded pain and suffering and hopelessness still exists. If we continue, we may see some progress ourselves. But perhaps more importantly future generations may get to realize a world we can barely dream of today.